Illustration Research Network

NEWS

The 14th Annual Illustration Research Symposium, ‘Illustration & Heritage: Sharing Histories to Draw Out Futures’ (November 2024), invited papers that explored the intersections between illustration and heritage, with international speakers from archaeology, architecture, archiving, conservation, design, heritage, illustration, and museology. The presentations – delivered as papers and exhibited as posters – allowed for an interdisciplinary exploration of the two practices, illustration and heritage, emphasizing their similarities both as active processes, considering their tangible and intangible dimensions.

For this volume of the Journal of Illustration, we bring illustration and heritage together once more. We play on this idea in our writing and classifications by using the slash: illustration/heritage. By bringing the two words closer together on the page, we narrow the gap.

Next Symposium:
Failure&Resistance

The 16th International Illustration Research Symposium provides space to discuss the often hidden (but ever present) topic of failure in the context of illustration. This symposium is jointly organised by independent practitioners and academics from the University of Exeter, Arts University Plymouth, and Parsons School of Design in New York. Hosted in Devon by Arts University Plymouth.

Intellect's interview

Intellect's James Campbell interviews Nanette Hoogslag (principle editor) and Adrian Holme (associate editor) of the Journal of Illustration in the Intellect's series of online talks 'In Conversation'

The 15th Illustration Research
symposium posters

The 15th Illustration Research symposium was organised by and held at the Koç University in Istanbul, Türkiye. It included an exhibition of posters reflecting on the role of technology in illustration. Here's a selection of posters from this exhibition:

COMMUNITY

The latest research and projects from the illustration research community, highlighted by the Journal of Illustration steering committee members and guest curators.

Representing Race

Guest curator: O Haruna

Illustration can reconceptualise what the body means through externalising the internal. In this three-part series, guest curator and animator O Haruna investigates what different types of bodies can reveal to us about racialisation in British animation.

An interview with Apple & Onion supervising character designer, Mark Ingram, discusses how George Gendi’s idealised melting pot of anthropomorphised foods (objects) evolves traditional expressions of ethnicities.

In a different vein, an interview with Rastamouse producer, Jackie Edwards, reveals how the cartoon’s anthropomorphised mice navigated critics and commissioners’ voices in its adaptation from children’s book to cartoon.

The series culminates with O reflecting on these interviews in relation to his practice-based research which experiments with animated representations of Black Britishness using storytelling without commercial constraints.

Apple & Onion: Racial Representation in Urban Melting Pots of Anthropomorphised Food

O Haruna talks to Mark Ingram about his role in playing with character design between cultural hybridity and familiar signifiers in the British-American cartoon Apple & Onion

O Haruna talks to Jackie Edwards about her role in overseeing the production of British cartoon Rastamouse amidst the cultural anxieties of experimental racial performance.

The artist shares insights on the differences between the research environment in art institutions in china and in the UK

Bologna Children's Book Fair as an institution

4 illustration academics share their impressions from Bologna 2026

The Ritual of Riso

Excerpt from an essay by Emily Evans

Accessible Lines

Hatiye Garip introduces Accessible Lines, a project which makes illustrations accessible for blind and low-vision audiences.

Call for Poster Abstracts

3D, VR, AR in illustrative place-making

Jenn Liv talks about her research into place- and memory-making through immersive technologies

A guide on collaborative picture book making from Rose Feather

Uncanny Traces

Guest curator: Lihong Liu

Absence unsettles what we think we see. In this three-part series, guest curator and artist Lihong Liu brings together reflections and conversations that circle memory, migration, loss, and the uncanny. Through an interview with printmaker Paul Coldwell, she considers how printmaking materialises loss, trace and afterimage. In her own essay, Drawing the Uncanny Home, Lihong Liu reflects on her practice-based research that renders the experience of migration through near-invisible drawings and installations, where near-invisibility becomes both erasure and shelter. The series concludes with a dialogue on art education across China and the UK, tracing how different research cultures shape artistic identity, research methods, and belonging.

Materializing Absence: Printmaking as a Lens for Memory and the Uncanny in Paul Coldwell’s Work

Lihong Liu talks to Paul Coldwell and reflects on his work

Drawing the Uncanny Home

Lihong Liu's reflective essay on her practice-based research

The artist shares insights on the differences between the research environment in art institutions in china and in the UK

EXPLORE COMMUNITY

ARCHIVE HIGHLIGHTS

The 14th Illustration Research
symposium posters

The 14th Illustration Research symposium was organised by the Illustration Programme at Camberwell College of Arts, and hosted at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL), United Kingdom. These are some highlights from the poster exhibition at the event.

Ben Jones

John Kilburn, Darren Aoki, Victoria Squire

Gemma Burditt

Christy Burdock

Geoff Grandfield

Hyunjin Seo

Maisy Summer

Matthew Booker

Amy Dover

Hannah Ackroyd

Esther McManus

Lindsay Baker

Call for illustration researchers

We welcome visual essays, critical reflections, experimental work, and illustration research projects from undergraduate or postgraduate students, academics, researchers, and practitioners.

Rather than highlighting portfolios, we focus on visual, written, or hybrid critical essays, archive studies, research-focused interviews and discussions, excerpts from papers/dissertations that reflect on illustration as a research discipline.

Get in touch if you would like your research to be featured on our website!

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